AI in Practice for Nonprofits with Carolyn Woodard and Erik Solce pt 1

About this episode

Carolyn Woodard explores how a nonprofit marketer with no IT background can run a real AI project with Erik Solce, IT Business Manager at Community IT. 

For years Carolyn had marketing data scattered across nine separate channel dashboards and no way to see any of it in context. Every attempt to build a unified report stalled out. In part one of this case study, she and Erik walk through the three part structure that finally made the project doable, and why it took weeks instead of the months she expected.

Erik shares what went sideways along the way, including a false path through Power BI, access and permission problems, and AI memory that kept reaching for a storage location the team had abandoned months earlier. 

Carolyn talks candidly about working with Copilot, Gemini, and Claude, why she moved between them, and what running into token limits taught her about choosing the right license. 

Carolyn and Erik discuss:

• The three part structure for AI enabled projects: the instigator who owns the problem, the tech coach who grounds it in reality, and the AI tool that helps analyze, research, and iterate.
• Why the subject matter expert has to stay involved in building the thing rather than waiting for someone to hand it over finished.
• What belongs in your IT foundation before you add AI, including an acceptable use policy, leadership ownership of IT strategy, and an IT roadmap to measure new tools against.
• Why an organization that has decided not to use AI still needs that decision written down in policy.
• How asking questions first, instead of writing a prompt, changed the project from a dashboard into a data lake.

Resources Mentioned:

• AI Resources for Nonprofits
• Mission Aligned AI Adoption Model for Nonprofits
• Template: Acceptable Use of AI Tools in the Nonprofit Workplace
• Cybersecurity Readiness for Nonprofits Playbook
• How to Use AI Tools Safely at Nonprofits
• Nonprofit IT Management Reddit Community
• Microsoft 365 Copilot for Nonprofits
• Gemini through Google for Nonprofits
• Claude for Nonprofits

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Start a conversation :)

• Register to attend a webinar in real time, and find all past transcripts at https://communityit.com/webinars/
• email Carolyn at [email protected]
• on LinkedIn 
• on reddit/r/nonprofitITmanagement
• on the Community IT website

Thanks for listening.